SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 2/16/2023 9:56 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-3 “The Affirmation”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
19:8-9
Message of the verses: “8 He said to them, "Because of your hardness of heart,
Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not
been this way. 9 “And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for
immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.’”
I said that we would begin this SD by looking at the
words “hardness of heart” and this suggests the condition where adultery was
prolonged and the sinning spouse was unrepentant, and this makes reconciliation
and a normal marriage relationship impossible.
MacArthur writes “When an adulterous husband or wife became totally
insensitive to marital fidelity, God through Moses indirectly and reluctantly permitted…divorce.”
Jesus
is reminding those Pharisees, His adversaries again of the Genesis teaching
about God’s plan for marriage. They
rarely listened to Him, and although they supposedly studied the Scriptures,
they only used them to make their case, and not what God was really speaking of
in His Word. So Jesus reminded them that
from the beginning it has not been this way. Divorce was never in God’s original, ideal
design for mankind and will never be.
God is immutable, meaning He never changes His mind, but God is also
gracious, and grace is what we all need.
Whenever
a man obtains a divorce for any reason except for immorality, and marries another
woman [he] commits adultery.’” Jesus gave the same basic teaching in the Sermon
on the Mount, He emphasized that the divorced wife and her new husband would be
led to commit adultery. “but I say to
you that everyone who divorces his wife, except for the reason of
unchastity, makes her commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman
commits adultery” (Matt. 5:32). In other
words, the message that Jesus wanted to get across to those exponents of easy
divorce and remarriage is that illegitimate divorce followed by remarriage
makes adulterers of everyone who is involved.
MacArthur
writes “Poreia, here translated immorality,
is a broad term that encompasses all illicit sexual activity. In the context of marriage it always
constituted adultery, which, by definition, is illicit sex by a married person. The verb form of the term is used by Paul to
describe the immorality for which 23,000 (of the total 24,000) Israelites were
killed by a plague in one day (1 Cor. 10:8; cf. Num. 25:9). Because the majority, if not all, of those
slain were probably married, poreia clearly
includes adultery.”
In
what Jesus is saying in both Matthew 19 and Matthew 5 about adultery, He is
speaking of a man divorcing a wife.
However because it was not really that common for a woman to divorce her
husband in that day the truth is that this applies to both men divorcing wife’s,
and woman divorcing their husbands, as that is much more common in today’s
world, especially in our country today.
It
is my desire to finish this section in our next SD as we have a bit more to
cover.
2/16/2023 10:27 AM
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